For the summer preview in The Hollywood Reporter, the trade talked to Columbia Pictures and producer Laura Ziskin about Spider-Man 2‘s potential – given that the first film made $114.8 million its first weekend.

“With ‘Spider-Man’ having done the numbers that it did, I don’t know that we’re out to beat that,” says Geoffrey Ammer, president of worldwide marketing at the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group. “That would be a very ambitious goal for anybody.”

The more important task, he adds, was to produce a film that would rival or best its predecessor creatively. “It’s just not a movie that we put a ‘2’ at the end of,” Ammer says. “I personally feel like we’ve made a better movie — better in the sense that it’s got more emotion, more heart, more action.”

Agrees producer Laura Ziskin: “We were just trying to build on the first one. The great thing about ‘Spider-Man’ is the characters: What we tried to do is, every character has a continuing drama in their life — an evolution and a crisis they’re dealing with — so it was fun to explore. In the first movie, we had the fun of the original story, and that was great — but in some ways, the benefit of the second movie is that the audience knows these characters and loves them and cares about them.”

It’s going to be fun to watch whether or not the sequel will top the original’s first few days.